Saturday, July 21, 2012

You Can Hear It in the Dark from Beyond What Was Once the Amusement Park

That's me, trapped in my car parked outside my house, recording Thursday night's storm. Yes I posted it last night too. I'm not trying to drive away readers I had said to K at Thursday Night Pints in response to her question of why the fuck I'm posting what the fuck I've been posting. I wasn't supposed to attend Thursday Night Pints - Thursday was my father's 80th birthday and we were to go out to dinner - but between my recovery from plague and Planet's full-on plague we cancelled, not wanting to give my father plague as his present. K has been asked to contribute to a site recently added to Because Left (I added it before I knew she'd been asked), she'll have a piece in a couple of months, she's threatened to start a blog for two plus years, go ahead, I dare you, it'd be like opening a nail salon in a dying strip mall, she wants to ask me blog questions, knows I want her to ask me blog questions, she studies this shit professionally, I fixate on it because I'm a dope. I wasn't going to write about this episode of Thursday Night Pints because it was mostly (FUN!) bleggalgazing. It's not that I'm trying to not drive readers away either, though bleggalgazing does it, almost as much as United posting. We hadn't heard of the Batman shooting, of course, but K sent me an email yesterday which included the line, I bet today is busy in Blegsylvania, and I responded no, not only because breaking news days drive eyes to big mouths in Blegsylvania, not only because Blegsylvania is dying, but because, what, another mass shooting spree in America, pfft, please, this is news?

Yes! I think of the song below the links when I think of that song above the links too!

Motherfucking Obama: “There are going to be other days for politics,” Obama told an audience that had gathered for what was originally intended to be a political speech in Fort Myers. “This, I think, is a day for prayer and reflection.” He led the audience in a moment of silence “for the victims of this terrible tragedy,” their loved ones and for “all the victims of less publicized acts of violence that plague our communities every single day.” Today is a day for craven cowardice couched as polite decorum, especially in an election year. Someone tweeted - I'd love to give credit but I forget who it was, don't have time - or will - to go down timeline - that these bullshit timeouts prove the bullshit of the game.

Oh, be fair to Obama, you say. OK: he'd be craven and cowardly even if this wasn't an election year.

The crow’s raw hectoring cry
scoops clean an oval divot
of sky, its fading echo
among the oaks and poplars swallowed
first by a jet banking west
then the Erie-Lackawanna
sounding its horn as it comes through the tunnel
through the cliffs to the river
and around the bend of King’s Cove Bluff,
full of timber, Ford chassis, rock salt.

You can hear it in the dark
from beyond what was once the amusement park.
And the wind carries along as well,
from down by the river,
when the tide’s just so,
the drainage just so,
the chemical ghost of old factories,
the rotted piers and warehouses:
lye, pigfat, copra from Lever Bros.,
formaldehyde from the coffee plant,
dyes, unimaginable solvents—
a soup of polymers, oxides,
tailings fifty years old
seeping through the mud, the aroma
almost comforting by now, like food,
wafting into my childhood room
with its fevers and dreams.
My old parents asleep,
only a few yards across the hall,
door open—lest I cry?
I remember
almost nothing of my life.